Amy Hempel stands in the driveway of a 1950s ranch in Gainesville, Fla., waiting for her real estate agent, David. She's looking for her next home.

"There are two types of houses in Gainesville," she says, "snaky and not snaky."

It's the onset of spring here, when the landscape explodes with life: a blunderbuss of wild grasses, careless flowers and a thousand species of bug, bird, lizard and amphibian.

The air is thick and warm, but not oppressive. You feel life happening everywhere. It's behind your eyes, scratches the back of your throat. Gainesville is a bit of an oasis in central Florida.

Hempel's last home is being packed up, a Cape Cod in Bethel, Conn., from which she commuted to her job as senior lecturer at Harvard University and as a core faculty member at the M.F.A. in Writing program at Bennington College. In December, she left Harvard to start a new job, complete her first new book in a decade and find home. "You don't have to dislike a place to leave it," she says.

David shows up to the house carrying pastries from Uppercrust, a local bakery he insists is the best in town. The inside of the '50s ranch is dark, dated. Hempel moves through the rooms.

"Walking through other people's houses is an imaginative act," she says. "Who would I be if I were here?"

David points out places Hempel could write, but Hempel doesn't seem concerned about that. She wants to see the backyard.

David leads her out to where there's a swimming pool and about half an acre of open space, both ideal for her dogs. Hempel brightens. "I tell my students to look for story ideas at the collision of fantasy and reality. I want a swimming pool."

Two lizards chase each other feet away from where Hempel stands. "Look at the chameleons," she says.

"True chameleons are becoming extinct," David says. Then he points to some miniature palm trees that border one side of the pool. "These are sago palms," and he walks down the row, pointing, "This one's male, this one's female, male, female, male, female. The females have little eggs on them. If the dogs eat them it could cause their kidneys to fail."

When Clark Elliott's Mazda was rear-ended by a skidding Jeep Cherokee one drizzly day in 1999, the incident seemed almost trivial. Elliott resisted efforts by emergency personnel to get him into an ambulance and instead went on to DePaul University, where he is a professor of artificial intelligence,...

When Clark Elliott's Mazda was rear-ended by a skidding Jeep Cherokee one drizzly day in 1999, the incident seemed almost trivial. Elliott resisted efforts by emergency personnel to get him into an ambulance and instead went on to DePaul University, where he is a professor of artificial intelligence,...

(Jenni Laidman)

This is the "reality" for Hempel. If she isn't completely turned off by the lack of light or the ankle-deep plush carpeting in the living room, this cinches it, snakes or no snakes.

Partners and friends

Part of what makes Gainesville home for Hempel is the novelist Jill Ciment, professor of English at the University of Florida, who has just published her seventh book, "Act of God." Ciment and Hempel have been friends since the 1970s.

"We must have met through David (Leavitt) or A.M. (Homes)," Ciment says. "We were all young writers in New York, and we all knew each other."

Hempel says, "When I think back I don't come up with a first meeting, but I just remember like a million years ago, book parties and publishing dinners."

Ciment lives in a much more modern ranch, one that she shares with her husband of more than 30 years, artist Arnold Mesches. This home has plenty of light and an expansive backyard that overlooks a small lake dominated by alligators. Over lunch on the back deck, Hempel spots one lurking close to the shoreline, the top of its head barely above the water.

"This one's closing in. It's close to the red kayak. Follow the red kayak straight out, to the right a little bit," Hempel says.

"It's just a baby," Ciment says. "About five foot."

"How do you know it's five foot?"

"I can measure between the bump of the eyes and the bump of the nose. You measure the inches and that's how you extrapolate how long the gator is. When you call up for a nuisance gator, which I've never done, but I guess if the gator were sitting up here I'd probably call."

Hempel's first new book in a decade is Ciment's book too. They wrote it under the pseudonym A.J. Rich. It's a psychological thriller and murder mystery titled "The Hand That Feeds You," a story about a 30-year-old woman in the midst of completing a thesis on victim psychology when she comes home one day to find her fiancé, Bennett, murdered and dismembered. She spends the rest of the novel trying to find out what happened to him, and, in the process, discovers that he is not the person she thought she loved.

"Normally, our writing is done for writing," Hempel says, "There was an occasion for this, though."

The occasion was Hempel and Ciment's friend, Katherine Russell Rich, former editor at GQ and author of two nonfiction books. In 1988, at age 32 and three weeks removed from a divorce, Rich was diagnosed with breast cancer, which seemed to be in remission until it returned as Stage IV breast cancer in 1993. (Given two years to live, she went on to live until 2012.)

"And then she, this amazing accomplished woman, met a guy," Ciment says. "And he knew she had Stage IV cancer and he fell in love with her. Over the course of a period of time, she discovered — and I notice it always happens at Christmastime, when you discover that your lover is married."

"If the man can't spend Christmas with you," Hempel says, "there's a reason. He lived with a woman in Europe, and he was carrying on with women like this all over the place, and who does this to a dying woman?"

"But of course it being Kathy," Ciment adds, "she didn't see it that way. She thought 'Woooo, this'll make a great book,' but before she had a chance to even begin the novel, the cancer went to her brain and she had no chance to write it."

During her fight with cancer, Rich had written 1999's "The Red Devil: To Hell With Cancer — and Back," an unsentimental journey through the difficulties of living with the disease, and the 2009 memoir "Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language." The book that became the occasion for Hempel and Ciment's collaboration would have been Rich's first novel.

"We had talked," Hempel says. "She and I talked a lot about what she wanted to do. We understood what she would have done, what she would have devoted her time to had she lived. So then — "

And that's what they've been doing for the past two years: finishing each other's sentences — Ciment here in Gainesville and Hempel still in Bethel. Occasionally, they'd come together at Ciment's apartment in Brooklyn.

"We were together and we did the first 18 pages when we were in the same room, talking about how to do it." Ciment says, "That gave us a leg up and then we stopped for almost a year. I was finishing a book. (Hempel) was finishing her work. We were teaching. Then we went on Google Drive and what we'd do is we would set up a time. We'd both phone each other and we'd both have this screen, see the same words, and that was the most miraculous thing. Sometimes I would say, 'Maybe we should do this' and I'd look down and it would be done."

Ciment and Hempel are both accomplished writers. They've been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and more than a handful of literary prizes apiece. How, then, could this possibly have worked?

"No ego," Hempel says. "This was a crucial part of the collaboration. We said going in, and we knew going in, there'd be no ego involved. So much that she could shoot down anything stupid that I wrote and vice versa. That was the baseline. No ego; no hurt feelings. At the time we started writing this we had been friends for over 30 years. I'm saying this because it's not like you can just do this with anybody, any other writer, so I felt secure that — "

Ciment continues the thought: "One of us would have an idea and say 'Now don't throw up, but try this one…' and our ego is in the book, which is how it should be. We have very different strengths, as well."

"Jill is primarily a novelist, and she has this big picture and the overarching design and plot sense, and I'm much more comfortable at the sentence level: the image, the diction. I'd never done a novel," Hempel says. "Both of our areas of confidence dovetailed well. "

Fans of Hempel and Ciment shouldn't count on reading a book that sounds like one or the other. They shouldn't try to find the Hempel parts and the Ciment parts, either.

"We wrote every line together," Ciment says. "It would be like trying to understand a marriage by asking who takes out the garbage, who empties the dishwasher."

Hempel says, "I think of an analogy I guess somebody made years ago in a musical sense when describing Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young as being four voices through the same throat. It wouldn't have worked if it sounded like two people."

Heading south from Harvard

During Harvard's spring break in 2014, Hempel came down to Gainesville to work on the book for a week. She did a reading at the University of Florida, and that turned into an interview at the university. Padgett Powell, co-director of the writing program at the school and a 1984 National Book Award nominee for "Edisto," offered her a job.

"She was the name of highest literary merit we could get," he says. "In fact, I don't know a name of higher literary merit right now in the country that's teaching. Secondarily, she brings the Lish minimal aesthetic, and that probably was not here to the extent that Hempel embraces it."

The "Lish minimal aesthetic" refers to Hempel's work with Gordon Lish, the legendary editor she met through taking his workshop, "Tactics of Fiction," at Columbia University during the mid-'70s. Former fiction editor at Knopf and Esquire, Lish edited and advised some of the biggest names in literary fiction: Don DeLillo, Richard Ford, Cynthia Ozick, Barry Hannah and Raymond Carver. Hempel's work with Lish launched her career, with her short story collection, "Reasons to Live," in 1985.

"The foundation of what I think about teaching comes from him," Hempel says. "Gordon knows everything about films, and a great deal of what I teach come from movies — really great writers movies."

Then she lists them as they occur to her: "How to Draw a Bunny" (2002); "Man on Wire" (2008); "The Secrets in Their Eyes" (2009); "A Separation" (2011); "The Great Beauty" (2013).

Hempel also likes to quote her peers, most of whom are her friends, in contemplating how to succeed as a fiction writer.

"Jill McCorkle once said that if you want to stay awake during long drives, hold a hundred-dollar bill out the window. It makes the familiar new. That was a teaching moment for me."

After a moment she continues, "It's new, but it's logical, and stories need to be logical on their own terms. Young writers think they can just create anything, but it has to be logical."

She references a story from Julia Slavin, a friend of hers since 1999, called "Dentaphilia," "A woman grows teeth all over her body and falls in love with a dentist. It's logical."

Perhaps Hempel should write a book of essays on craft?

"No, Michael Cunningham should write one," she says. "I succeeded him at Brooklyn College, and before he left he gave me a large binder filled with what he called 'a compilation of his thoughts over the years.' He was great for that program and he helped me."

Hempel drives through a neighborhood in Gainesville called Duckpond and seems to fall in love. She passes a house she's heard is on the market, one surrounded by tall hedges, and had to drive in reverse up the one-way street in order to see it. She peeks through the gaps in the hedges.

While she's driving away, she says, "Jim Shepard said that it is possible to have kinds of homecoming without having home."

While Hempel waits to find the next home that will suit her, she stays in a small apartment just off campus at a complex used by some of the graduate students at the University of Florida. This is where she lives with her dogs, and after going into the apartment for a minute or two, she emerges with them: Wannie, a 12-year-old Golden Retriever and Ghandi, an 8-year-old rescued pit bull.

Hempel's Subaru is basically a three-seater: Hempel drives and the dogs occupy the rest of the space. A thin blanket of hair covers the seats.

The three of them are off to Dogwood, a 15-acre park where dogs can run unfettered. The park has two freshwater ponds, an agility course, giant sand pits for digging, fenced-in areas for privacy and a shower to rinse the dogs after they've had their fill.

Hempel decided years ago, maybe even while writing the pages of her novella, "Tumble Home," that her devotion to other sentient beings would be spent mostly on dogs.

"When you have a child, your dog becomes your pet. That would not happen to me. I can't stand the sound of a person eating, but I love the sound of a dog crunching down on kibble. I love a dog's appetite. The appetite of a baby is a frightening thing to me. I watch a mother spoon food into her baby's mouth, then spoon back in what the baby spits out; to me, it is the job of spackling. If I had a baby, I would change overnight from a woman who worries about the calories in the glue of an envelope to someone who goes to the corner for coffee, a nightgown showing beneath my coat, the hem of that gown clawed to shreds by a cat."

Hempel stands at the edge of one of the ponds, hurling a tree branch like a javelin into the water so Wannie can swim out and retrieve it. She does this probably 15 times before Ghandi races over from the sandpits to join them. Paddling together side by side, and with their mouths wrapped around the tree branch, the dogs return it to their owner together.

Frank Tempone is a writer and teacher who lives in Andersonville. Follow him on Twitter @Tempone, and read more about his interview with Hempel at www.absolutegentleman.net